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The Queen Mary: Greatest Ocean Liner will screen on BBC Four at 9pm tonight. Here are a few things you probably didn't know about the retired ship, which is now a hotel and museum - and an account of a recent stay on board.

20 fascinating facts about Queen Mary

Built in Clydebank at a cost of £3.5m (around £223m today; by comparison, the bill for the record-breaking Harmony of the Seas, one of the world’s newest cruise ships, was just over £1bn), Queen Mary sailed from 1936 until 1967.

Building the ship in ScotlandCredit:
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The ship was named after Mary of Teck, the wife of George V. The king died shortly before the ship’s maiden voyage. Legend has it that Cunard wanted to name the ship Victoria, but after asking the king for permission to name the ship “after Britain’s greatest queen”, he replied that his wife would be delighted.

The ship's bowCredit:
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It will surprise nobody to discover that the naming ceremony was met with heavy rain. “CROWD’S ENTHUSIASM UNQUENCHED BY DRENCHING RAIN”, read the headline in The Daily Telegraph, alongside a 16-page supplement, written by the appropriately named shipping correspondent Hector C Bywater. The pullout explains that Queen Mary will “carry British maritime supremacy to still greater heights”.

The Daily Telegraph produced a 16-page supplement upon its launchCredit:
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

She was 1,019.4 ft (310.7 m) long and weighed 81,237 GRT). She captured the Blue Riband in August 1936 (awarded to the fastest ship to cross the Atlantic), lost the title to SS Normandie in 1937, but recaptured it in 1938, with average speeds of 30.99 knots (57.39 km/h; 35.66 mph) westbound and 31.69 knots (58.69 km/h; 36.47 mph), holding it until 1952 when she was beaten by the new SS United States.

The ship cost £223m to build in today's moneyCredit:
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Each funnel had a circumference of 100 feet, wide enough to take three large locomotives side by side.

On board facilities include two swimming pools, beauty salons, libraries, nurseries, a music studio, a lecture hall, dog kennels, prayer rooms, a telephone connectivity to anywhere in the world.

There were 30,000 lamps on board, a garage for 36 cars, and an acre of kitchens to prepare the 50,000 meals served during each crossing.

The on-board barberCredit:
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A walk around the promenade deck was equal to walking the length of Regent Street.

A mural in the main dining room featured a map of the Atlantic and a crystal model of the ship which tracked its progress.

The main dining roomCredit:
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The ship carried the Queen Mother, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Laurel and Hardy, and Winston Churchill (six times).

Berths were not cheap, costing £80 per passage (equivalent to around £3,700 today)

During the Second World War the Queen Mary was stripped down, painted camouflage grey and used to transport troops and prisoners of war. Her speed made her a success, outstripping the U-boats sent to block her and earning the moniker the Grey Ghost.

Allied soldiers on the converted vesselCredit:
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She retains the record for the greatest number of persons on one vessel, at 16,683, and Churchill is said to have claimed that her contribution shortened the war by a year.

During that record-breaking trip, Queen Mary was hit by a rogue wave that may have been up to 28 metres tall. It was calculated that the ship tipped 52 degrees and would have capsized if it had rolled three degrees more.

Six miles of carpet and 220 cases of china were kept in storage during her war years.

Polishing the silverCredit:
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She returned to service in 1947 and, alongside Queen Elizabeth, dominated the transatlantic passenger trade until the arrival of the jet age.

With Cunard operating at a loss, the ship was retired and sold for £1.2m, having completed her 1,000th and final crossing of the North Atlantic. She carried a total of 2,112,000 passengers more than 3,792,227 miles.

Loading cars onto the shipCredit:
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It has been moored at Long Beach, California, since 1967, despite never having visited Los Angeles during its time in service. Visitors can even spend the night on board.

The Churchill Suite is still there – it is said that he planned the D-Day Landings in the bathtub. Baths offered both salt water and fresh water.

The ship is said to be haunted by prisoners of war who died on board. Paranormal television shows have made numerous visits.

On board Cunard's retired liner in Long Beach

By Caroline Davies

In December 1938, British student Tom Williams steered through the crowds at New York’s harbour to Pier 90. An undergraduate at Cardiff, he had just completed a whistle-stop debating tour of American universities.

Photographers loitered around First Class; Time magazine had reported days before that this Christmas transatlantic voyage, operated by Cunard White Star, would be carrying British nobility, a Secretary of State and a Hollywood actor. Tom slipped through the entrance for Third-Class passengers. He would be spending five days on the grey winter sea on his way to Southampton in the ship’s bowels.

Almost eight decades later, through the windows of my porthole, I spotted palm trees. The Queen Mary, launched in 1934 as a passenger liner that carried the Queen Mother, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Laurel and Hardy, Winston Churchill (six times) and my grandfather, Tom Williams, across the Atlantic, has been moored in Long Beach, California, since 1967. Part museum and (latterly) part hotel, it has, like many expats before it, retired to the sunshine and a slower pace of life.

Over the past 50 years the ship has become part of the fabric of a city it never visited. Driving from Los Angeles to its dock at Long Beach, I followed signs for the “Queen’s Highway” until I spotted three red-and-black funnels across a vast car park. They are replicas, rebuilt after the originals crumbled during repair. Sandwich boards advertised a winter amusement park and a Princess Diana exhibition.

Queen Mary departs for its maiden voyageCredit:
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I was shown around the ship by Commodore Everette Hoard – an honorary title, he explained, bestowed after decades of service. “I’ve loved this ship since childhood,” he said. “I grew up in Alabama, which is almost landlocked, but I spent all my time drawing ships. In 1980, my father quit his job and moved the family to California so I could work on the Queen Mary. It was all I ever wanted. I’ve been here since I was 20 years old.”

We wandered through Churchill’s suite. “He planned the D-Day Landings in the bathtub,” said Hoard. There is now a flat-screen television perched in one corner of the room.

The ship’s First Class area retains the trappings of opulence: Odeon Art Deco carvings, shapely columns, high ceilings and untouched fireplaces that could not be lit for fear of causing an inferno; the ship contains so much wood that it would not be built with today’s safety requirements. Historical accuracy is expensive, however, and much of the ship’s original flooring has been replaced with modern carpet. The engineering officers’ cabins have been turned into an elegant sea-view restaurant, Sir Winston’s. The authenticity of the former cabins is muted, but not lost, with the original four-tap (salt water or fresh water) baths still intact.

“Some people might think it corny,” said Jeff, a taxi driver from Nevada, of his stay. “But I love that eerie feeling of the history that has gone before you.”

The ship's cocktail loungeCredit:
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My grandfather’s quarters had likely long been knocked through; two bunk beds to a cabin and eight cabins to a bathroom would only have been considered “luxurious” in the Thirties. Small though they were, these berths were not cheap at £80 per passage (equivalent to £3,700 today). Hoard and I took the forward stairs, down into the bowels of the ship. Here, passengers would have felt the climb and drop far more acutely than in First Class, in the middle; during a storm, it could pitch to the equivalent of eight storeys.

The Third-Class Garden Lounge – its cabinets now empty and the wicker chairs which were easily pushed aside for dancing now gone – still depicts an English garden, inlaid in wood, on one of the walls. The dining room, where my grandfather would have eaten steak-and-kidney pie on long tables with some of the other 250 Third- Class passengers, retains its post-war linoleum floors, but its walls are scratched by the stacking and unstacking of chairs. Third Class is not an embarrassment, but nor is it the attraction.

Still, the Commodore told me, most guests who return to the ship didn’t travel in First. “Almost all the visitors we see who have some connection to the ship were from Tourist or Third,” he said. “Or, of course, military.”

During the Second World War the Queen Mary was stripped down, painted camouflage grey and used to transport troops and prisoners of war. Her speed made her a success, outstripping the U-boats sent to block her and earning the moniker the Grey Ghost. She retains the record for the greatest number of persons on one vessel, at 16,683, and Churchill is said to have claimed that her contribution shortened the war by a year.

Wartime casualties may well have added to the Queen Mary’s other draw: ghosts. Countless prisoners of war are believed to have died on the lower decks, but passengers and crew are also said to wander the corridors. The now empty pool is supposedly frequented by a little girl, Jackie. Watertight door No 13 crushed a young engineer to death in 1966. One room, B340, is said to hold a particularly aggressive poltergeist. It is now empty.

“There is something unusual about that room,” said the Commodore. “I get vertigo when I am in there.”

Along with the ex-military visitors, the ghost hunters and the Thirties romantics, there are the admirers of ships. I spoke to Ron, a British former marine engineer. “I’ve not stepped on to a ship in decades,” he told me. “To see a ship in this condition, with the engines so perfectly kept, is really wonderful.”

On the day the ship was launched a British psychic, Mable Fortescue-Harrison, made a prediction. “The Queen Mary, launched today, will know its greatest fame and popularity when she never sails another mile and never carries another passenger.”

Now a shared piece of British and American history, this ship does not have the same majesty it once did; its grand ballrooms are used for conferences, its famous passengers are remembered with restaurants. Instead, the ship has a new purpose and a new atmosphere; it is still admired, but mostly it is cherished.

And my grandfather? He became a baptist minister before becoming a criminal barrister, a Labour MP and finally a judge. He travelled back to America frequently, although by then, I believe, he always flew.

The ship now resides in Long Beach, CaliforniaCredit:
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Essentials

Stay on the ship: rates start at $110 per room, excluding breakfast and tax but including an audio tour. Try to avoid the windowless inside rooms and request a porthole with a harbour view (001 877 342 0742; queenmary.com).

To visit for the day: a Queen Mary “passport” costs from $27 per adult.

To dine on board: you will need a $15 dining voucher which does not give access to the rest of the ship.